Winnipeg, May 4, 2012: Ta’Kaiya Blaney speaking at the Circle of Life Thunderbird House in Winnipeg about the need to oppose the Enbridge Gateway Pipeline Project. Photo: Paul S. Graham

One of the youngest passengers on the Yinka Dene Alliance Freedom Train is Ta’Kaiya Blaney, 11, of Sliammon First Nation in British Columbia. I don’t believe I have seen a more articulate, self-possessed, and inspiring child in my life.

She spoke in Winnipeg last night, at the Circle of Life Thunderbird House, about the struggle to stop the Enbridge Gateway Pipeline. Her presentation was impressive enough, but then she performed “Shallow Waters,” a song she co-wrote with her singing instructor, Aileen De La Cruz, and the audience was entranced.

“Shallow Waters” could become the anthem for all who love and seek to protect the Earth. And Ta’Kaiya Blaney? Well, judge for yourself. She could become pretty much anything she chooses.

Important Links

• Yinka Dene Alliance
• Yinka Dene Alliance Freedom Train
• Yinka Dene Alliance Freedom Train Petition

See also

• Video: Tar Sands Pipelines & Tankers
• Video: Yinka Dene Alliance Freedom Train Winnipeg News Conference

UPDATE: After posting the first video I went to a Yinka Dene Alliance rally at the historic junction of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. Ta’Kaiya was one of the featured speakers. Here she performs “Carried Away” – which is both a lament for the loss of the natural environment and a call to action. You can find the lyrics on her web site.

Winnipeg, May 4, 2012: Hereditary Chief Tsodih of the Nak’azdli First Nation speaking at a news conference at Circle of Life Thunderbird House. Photo: Paul S. Graham

The Yinka Dene Alliance is on a cross country mission to tell Canadians why they have decided to refuse the construction of the Enbridge Gateway Pipeline across their land. They arrived on VIA Rail last night and held a news conference this morning at the Circle of Life Thunderbird House in Winnipeg. Mainstream media response was underwhelming; it appears that most were distracted by Jim Flaherty’s visit to the Winnipeg Mint to watch the last shiny copper come off the assembly line today. Oh, those shiny pennies!! Oh, how bedazzling for the media!

Because most of the mainstream media declined the invitation to participate, you and your friends are unlikely to find out what was said — unless you watch this video and share it widely.

If you don’t have 52 minutes, here’s an interview I recorded last night at Union Station with Hereditary Chief Na’Moks.

1. End its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantle the Wall;
2. Recognize the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respect, protect and promote the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

The BDS campaign has been taken up by human rights activists around the world and there is some evidence that it is having an impact. For example, last month the Norwegian retail chain, VITA, announced it would stop all sales of products originating from settlements in occupied Palestine, including Ahava cosmetics. Also, last month, graduate students at Carleton University overwhelmingly voted in a referendum to call upon the university’s pension fund to divest from four companies that are complicit in the occupation of Palestine. The BDS campaign is being credited with the decision of the West London Waste Authority to exclude French multinational Veolia from a £485 million contract. Veolia helped build and is involved in operating a tram-line which links Jerusalem with illegal Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank; it also takes waste from Israel and illegal  Israeli Settlements and dumps this on Palestinian land at the Tovlan landfill.

One measure of its effectiveness may be the passage of a law in the Israeli Knesset last year that facilitates attacks on supporters of BDS.  After all, if BDS were ineffective, there would be no reason to pass a law against it. According to the Jerusalem Post, the law “allows citizens to bring civil suits against persons and organizations that call for economic, cultural or academic boycotts against Israel, Israeli institutions or regions under Israeli control. It also prevents the government from doing business with companies that initiate or comply with such boycotts.”

“Can boycott, divestment and sanctions stop Israeli apartheid?” was the title of a forum held March 7, 2012 as part of Israeli Apartheid Week 2012 in Winnipeg. Featured speakers were Dalit Baum and Mostafa Henaway. Baum is an Israeli activist and co-founder of WhoProfits.org, a website that exposes corporate complicity in Israel’s subjugation of Palestinians. Henaway is a human rights activist who works with Tadamon! Montreal. Moderated by Lisa Stepnuk, the forum was sponsored by Students Against Israeli Apartheid and the Winnipeg Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid. As usual, I was there for Winnipeg Community TV to record the discussion.

Campaign to divest the Canada Pension Plan from complicity in Israeli Apartheid

The Ottawa-based Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade has produced an invaluable resource that forms the first step in a campaign to compel the Canada Pension Plan to divest from companies that support Israeli apartheid. According to COAT’s co-ordinator, Richard Sanders,

“COAT’s research cites data from hundreds of sources to expose 64 corporations that have two things in common:

(1) they profit from links to Israeli government institutions, agencies and corporations that hide behind the euphemisms of “defence” and “homeland security,” and

(2) the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) held shares in these companies, with a market value of $1.4 billion in 2011.

You can learn more here.

As a part of Israeli Apartheid Week 2012 in Winnipeg, Paul Burrows and Cheryl-Anne Carr discussed the impact of colonialism on the indigenous peoples of Canada and Palestine. The similarities are disturbing and striking.

The event was sponsored by:

• Students Against Israeli Apartheid
• Winnipeg Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid
• CanPalNet (Winnipeg)
• Independent Jewish Voices (Winnipeg)

Lester B. Pearson has been dead for four decades, but his imagined legacy, that of international peacekeeper, remains one of the defining myths of the Canadian identity. Horrified by our murderous behavior in the occupation of Afghanistan and the bombings of Libya and the former Yugoslavia, the sainted memory of our 14th prime minister is resurrected by people who ought to know better to argue that war-making is not really a Canadian value, that we need to retake our traditional place in the global community as a progressive force for international co-operation, harmony and peace – that we must, again, assume the mantle of our revered Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Mike Pearson.

Yves Engler‘s sixth book, Lester Pearson’s Peacekeeping: The Truth May Hurt, was written to put an end to this nonsense. Canadian foreign policy continues to serve the interests of Canada’s corporate elite, and Pearson’s major contribution to this end was to shift Canadian allegiance from the declining British Empire to the emerging American one. With his peacekeeping fig leaf firmly in place, he backed some of the most murderous thugs of the 20th Century. As Noam Chomsky puts it in the preface to Engler’s book:

“Canada’s Nobel Peace Prize winner and eminent statesman, Lester Pearson was a major criminal, really extreme. He didn’t have the power to be like an American president, but if he had it, he would have been the same. He really tried.”

To encapsulate the book, Yves assembled a list of the “Top 10 things you don’t know about Canada’s most famous statesman, Lester B. Pearson.”

10. Asked in Parliament, he refused to call for Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.
9. He had Canada deliver weapons to the French to put down the Algerian and Vietnamese independence movements.
8. The Kennedy administration helped Pearson win his first minority government.
7. He incited individuals to destroy a peace group after it called for the outlawing of nuclear weapons.
6. Pearson backed the CIA coups in Iran and Guatemala.
5. He described the formation of NATO, not peacekeeping, as the “most important thing I participated in.”
4. Pearson threatened to quit as external affairs minister if Canada failed to deploy ground troops to Korea.
3. He agreed to have Canada’s representatives to the International Control Commission for Vietnam spy for the US and deliver their bombing threats to the North.
2. The world’s leading intellectual, Noam Chomsky, considers Lester Pearson a war criminal.
1. Stephen Harper’s foreign policy resembles that of Pearson more than any Liberal would ever admit.

Yves Engler was in Winnipeg on March 15, speaking at the Mondragon Bookstore and Coffee House. His appearance was sponsored by Peace Alliance Winnipeg. Dwayne Crowe and I prepared this video report for Winnipeg Community Television.

UPDATE: You can watch a video report of Yves Engler’s March 15th Winnipeg presentation here.

Foreign policy analyst Yves Engler will be speaking in Winnipeg Thursday about his newest book, Lester Pearson’s Peacekeeping: The Truth May Hurt.

Date: Thursday, March 15, 2012
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Mondragon Bookstore and Coffee House, 91 Albert Street, Winnipeg
Admission: Free. Donations will be requested to help defray expenses.

Written in the form of a submission to an imagined “Truth and Reconciliation” commission about Canada’s foreign policy past Lester Pearson’s Peacekeeping: The Truth May Hurtchallenges one of the most important Canadian foreign policy myths – that of Lester B. Pearson as peacekeeper.

Lester Pearson is one of Canada’s most important political figures. A Nobel Peace Prize laureate, he is considered a great peacekeeper and ‘honest broker.’ But in this critical examination of his work, Pearson is exposed as an ardent cold warrior who backed colonialism and apartheid in Africa, Zionism, coups in Guatemala, Iran and Brazil and the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic. A beneficiary of U.S. intervention in Canadian political affairs, he also provided important support to the U.S. in Vietnam and pushed to send troops to the American war in Korea.

Yves Engler has published five other books:

• Stop Signs — Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay (with Bianca Mugyenyi)
• The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy (Shortlisted for the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non Fiction in the Quebec Writers’ Federation Literary Awards)
• Playing Left Wing: From Rink Rat to Student Radical and (with Anthony Fenton)
• Canada in Haiti: Waging War on The Poor Majority
• Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid

His six books have been praised by Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, William Blum, Rick Salutin and many others.

His visit to Winnipeg is being hosted by Peace Alliance Winnipeg.

Winnipeg, March 11, 2012: Winnipeggers rally outside of Tory MP Joyce Bateman's office demanding the federal government allow a full inquiry into the federal election robocall scandal. Photo: Paul S. Graham

While Prime Minister Stephen Harper undoubtedly wishes this issue would disappear, Canadians marched in more than two dozen cities today, demanding a full inquiry into the federal election robocall scandal. In Winnipeg, over 100 rallied at the corner of Osborne Street and River Avenue where organizer Josh Brandon expressed the sense of outrage that many Canadians feel about the undermining of Canada’s electoral system. Speakers Kevin Lamoureux (Liberal MP for Winnipeg North) and Judy Wasylycia-Leis (former NDP MP for the same riding) urged them to support an NDP-sponsored bill that would grant Elections Canada greater powers to investigate electoral fraud, including the more than 30,000 complaints filed by Canadians about the last federal election.

At the conclusion of the speeches, the demonstrators marched to the Winnipeg South Centre office of Tory MP Joyce Bateman, to present her with a petition regarding concerns about robocalls that were made to voters in that riding. In the previous election Bateman narrowly defeated the Liberal incumbent, Anita Neville.

Here is my video report.

Was Glover poorly informed or spinning for her boss, Stephen Harper? Watch the video and judge for yourself.

After you’ve watched this, you may want to watch Tar Sands, Pipelines and Tankers – the forum at which Gerald Amos spoke, along with Wade Davis, Lynne Fernandez and Anne Lindsey.

The project is meeting fierce opposition, especially in northern BC, and the federal government has declared war on anyone who opposes this project. In Winnipeg, a coalition of environmental groups banded together to hold a public forum on February 16, 2012 at the University of Winnipeg entitled Tar Sands, Pipelines and Tankers. Over 300 people turned out to view an excellent 16-minute documentary by Pacific Wild entitled Oil in Eden and to dialogue with an expert panel, moderated by journalist Ricard Cloutier.

The Panel

Dr. Wade Davis is Explorer in Residence, National Geographic Society, Visiting Professor and Senior Fellow of the Masters in Development Practice (MDP) Indigenous Development program, University of Winnipeg.

As well, he is the author of The Sacred Headwaters: the fight to save the Stikine, Skeena and Nass.

Gerald Amos was Chief Councillor for the Haisla First Nation for 12 years. He has been a leading voice for conservation in Canada for thirty years.

He is the author of an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Natural Resources Minister, Joe Oliver “No apology forthcoming.”

Lynne Fernandez, of the Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives has an MA in economics from the University of Manitoba. As a research associate at the Manitoba office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Lynne has studied municipal and provincial social and economic policy. She is also interested in labour and environmental issues.

Anne Lindsey is former executive director of the Manitoba Eco-Network. Since 1984, Anne has worked on such Manitoba and national issues as nuclear waste, forestry, food, pesticides and environmental reviews.

This event was organized by the Manitoba Eco-Network, Green Action Centre, Climate Change Connection, the Council of Canadians (Winnipeg), and the Green Action Committee of the First Unitarian-Universalist Church, with the support of the University of Manitoba’s Global Political Economy Program and the University of Winnipeg.

I hope you can schedule some time to view the video report I prepared in collaboration with Ken Harasym for Winnipeg Community TV. At two-and-a-half hours, it is long, but it is crammed with information and analysis that make it well worth the time.

Winnipeg, Feb. 14, 2012: Protesters pause outside the Department of Indian Affairs in Winnipeg to sing and dance during the Men's Gathering and Unity Walk for Missing and Murdered Women. Photo: Paul Graham

Winnipeg, February 14, 2012: A group of aboriginal men held a march to show solidarity with the families of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada. While the march was organized by men, there were no restrictions on who could attend – all were welcome – and there was a good turnout of men, women and children of all ages.

Feb. 14, 2012: Protesters outside the Law Courts Building in Winnipeg during the Men's Gathering and Unity Walk for Missing and Murdered Women. Photo: Paul Graham

The march began at the corner of Carlton Street and Portage Avenue, the site of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, and wound through downtown Winnipeg, stopping at the Department of Indian Affairs, the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs and the Law Courts Building, before ending up at the Manitoba Legislative Building. Despite the marked police presence (several squad cars, a helicopter overhead), the marchers remained peaceful and good spirited. I use the word “despite” because it was clear the marchers would have preferred the cops to be putting their energies into catching killers and finding missing women.

While some estimates put the number of missing and murdered women at 600, no one really knows. What is clear is that not nearly enough is being done to locate these women and to stop the carnage.

Feb. 14, 2012: Protesters in front of a symbolic hearse at the Manitoba Legislature in Winnipeg during the Men's Gathering and Unity Walk for Missing and Murdered Women. Photo: Dwayne Crowe

Here are some links that can help you understand this issue in more depth:

• Native Women’s Association of Canada – http://www.nwac.ca/
• Sisters in Spirit – http://www.sistersinspirit.ca/index.htm
• Red Power United – http://www.redpowerunited.com/

And here is my video report.